Freeform modeling and screen mode manipulation

 From:  pior (PIOR_O)
5843.29 
Hi there Michael ! That does make complete sense of course. If anything I am glad to have at the very least brought the topic to your attention.

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So, without going the route of a screen-based manipulation mode ... is there a way at this time to display some sort of direct world space XYZ manipulator, at the very least ? (I actually tend to avoid the use of manipulators in 3d software as I find them distracting, and tend to rely fully on kb shortcuts instead whenever possible ; but in the case of MOI I do believe that a simple barebones Move manipulator would help quite a bit.)

Either that, or maybe a script/command that could be assigned to a shortcut, allowing to move a selection by a given amount of centimeters on one specific axis (as opposed to having to manually activate and use the regular move tool, or having to go into an ortho view to grab and drag there).

Overall I think this is the common underlying topic of my remarks (both this one here as well as the one about the unneeded highlighting of components) : the MOI UX design is very proactive when it comes to walking the user down the branching paths of possible inputs (for instance : clicking a few times to gradually go down from object mode to edge or face mode ; or similarly, having the user "hunt around" the screen with the mouse until the desired X, Y or Z Straight Snap axis gets selected). But in the case of a user knowing *exactly* what they want to do beforehand, this paradigm gets mildly frustrating because it introduces unneeded options interrupting the flow state.

For instance : if I know in advance that I want to move a selection up on the vertical axis, being presented with 2 other directions picked up by the Straight Snap mode along the way gets irritating because in my mind these options were already ruled out - therefore having them flash on screen somewhat gives the impression of going backwards.

It's a little hard to explain but I hope this makes sense !

EDITED: 27 Nov 2019 by PIOR_O